Like the stone monuments it displays, the venerable archaeological museum stands the tests of time

By Molly Dewsnap Meinhardt

052 Now, if a king among kings, or a governor among governors or a commander of an army should come up against Byblos and uncover this coffin, may the scepter of his rule be torn away, may the throne of his kingdom be overturned, and may peace...

026 One morning in February 1846, a little over 150 years ago, the young Englishman Austen Henry Layard was returning to work after visiting his friend Sheikh Abd-ur-rahman, the head of a local Arab tribe. Layard had been in northern Mesopotamia...

The thousands of individual burials, the several mass burials and the animal burials all demonstrate that these were sacrificial offerings to the gods.

By Lawrence E. StagerJoseph A. Greene

029 The evidence that Phoenicians ritually sacrificed their children comes from four sources. Classical authors and biblical prophets charge the Phoenicians with the practice. Stelae associated with burial urns found at Carthage bear decorations...

026 In putting together this issue’s article on the Antiquities Problem (“The Great MFA Exposé”), our thoughts turned to unprovenanced objects that can now be studied by scholars because they were bought on the market. If these important remnants...

033 Moses Wilhelm Shapira is best known for the so-called Shapira Strips, narrow fragments of supposedly ancient parchment on which were inscribed a somewhat different version of the Ten Commandments from Deuteronomy than is known from the Bible...

In 1992 and 1993, at Sepphoris (in Hebrew, Tzippori) in the lower Galilee, we uncovered two inscribed amulets designed to invoke magical powers.1 It’s not abracadabra; it’s WHYHAW and AWAAA. See if that will cure your fever! These two amulets, small silver and bronze scrolls, open a fascinating...

051 Iphigenia and Isaac, an unlikely pair. Yet both were almost sacrificed—one to a Greek goddess and the other to the universal Israelite God. Both Iphigenia and Isaac were innocent of any wrongdoing. In the end, both were saved when the deity...

The King David Hotel in Jerusalem has witnessed many historical scenes, some violent, others diplomatic. One of the more curious incidents took place in April 1974, when a security guard accompanying U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on an official visit to Israel happened to look out a...

044 To most people, Yemen is an obscure part of southwest Arabia that appears to have escaped major currents of history. Yemen’s greatest claim to fame is that it is known as the birthplace of the queen of Sheba and that it was once the center of...

The Tophet was the final resting place for the still-born and for children who died in early infancy.

By M’hamed Hassine Fantar

028 Were it not for a few classical accounts, scholars would probably not attribute the burials in the Carthage Tophet to child sacrifice. Some of the more sensational stories, such as those related by the first-century B.C. historian Diodorus...

017 If you read later Sumerian literature, you will think that Sumer was always a monarchy ruled by a king. That is what these later kings wanted you to believe. But this is not necessarily so. How monarchy came to Sumer is in fact a fascinating...

044 Among the many features of Western intellectual history that can be traced to the ancient Near East, none has been more powerful than the idea of transcendental monotheism—the belief in only one god who exists eternally and apart from his...

027 After defeating the army of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem at the Horns of Hattin, west of the sea of Galilee, in 1187, the Egyptian sultan Saladin marched unopposed into Jerusalem. European Crusaders, mostly from the region of present-day...

026 European archaeologists were digging in the ancient Near East before the age of Napoleon. Americans, by contrast, were latecomers. The United States did not launch its first formal archaeological expedition in the Near East until the late...